DSN takes lead from ‘King of All Media’

By Rob Eder

It appears that even the “King of All Media” Howard Stern gets his news from Drug Store News. Traffic on the site spiked in late December when a DrugStoreNews.com story made it into Stern sidekick Robin Quivers’ daily news broadcast during the Thursday, Dec. 16 show. The Stern Web page also linked to the story under the “It’s Time for Robin’s News” section in the rundown for the satellite radio program’s show (“Use lanolin on your cracked nipples” at HowardStern.com/Rundown.hs).

The DSN article, “Study: Lansinoh HPA Lanolin may reduce nipple pain among breast-feeding mothers,” focused on a recent study that found that women who breast-feed experienced a significant reduction in nipple pain and higher healing rates of nipple trauma when they used a topical application of Lansinoh’s HPA Lanolin.

Thousands of Stern fans, in addition to regular DSN Group online users, logged on to DrugStoreNews.com to learn more about Lansinoh’s study. As of press time, the story remained the No. 1 story on DrugStoreNews.com.

The whole event speaks volumes to the reach of The Drug Store News Group and its power to extend a message to a wider group of potential influencers. This is just another example of DSN’s ability to help you grow your brand.

OK — so, obviously, Howard Stern is not a Drug Store News subscriber. Neither is Robin Quivers. I checked — neither of them gets the magazine. I know that the Howard Stern- Lansinoh story is a bit of an anomaly. But not really — not if you know anything about search engine optimization and how information is disseminated online. And if you know anything at all about Howard Stern, it should come as no surprise that Quivers uses such key words as “nipple” and “breasts” in her various news-alert profiles — that’s half the show right there.

How do we know it made a difference for Lansinoh? Because Lansinoh told us so. The company’s phones and the website were jamming in the days leading into the New Year.

It reminds me of another story about Lansinoh and Drug Store News. About five years ago, senior editor Michael Johnsen wrote a story for his OTC page about the growth in the natural feeding category, and one company that pretty much owned the business — Lansinoh. As the story goes, the CEO of one of the biggest chains in the industry ripped that page out of the issue, circled the article and sent it to the category manager responsible for that business with a handwritten note: “What are we doing to make this a destination at [our chain]?”

Howard Stern had nothing to do with that. We had almost 90,000 visits at DrugStoreNews.com in the month of January. I guess that means for this industry, DSN is the King of All Media.